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shar303 writes "A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21-year-old worker was the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms."

C++You accidentally create a dozen clones of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

JAVAAfter importing java.awt.right.foot.* and java.awt.gun.right.hand.*, and writing the classes and methods of those classes needed, you've forgotten what the hell you're doing.

RubyYour foot is ready to be shot in roughly five minutes, but you just can't find anywhere to shoot it.

PHPYou shoot yourself in the foot with a gun made with pieces from 300 other guns.

ASP.NETFind a gun, it falls apart. Put it back together, it falls apart again. You try using the.GUN Framework, it falls apart. You stab yourself in the foot instead.

PerlYou shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you.

JavascriptYou've perfected a robust, rich user experience for shooting yourself in the foot. You then find that bullets are disabled on your gun.

CSSYou shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.

FORTRANYou shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling ability.

COBOLUsing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER. on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.

LISPYou shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with whichyou shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with whichyou shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with whichyou shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with whichyou shoot yourself in the appendage which holds....

BASICShoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Visual BasicYou'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.

AdaAfter correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.

AssemblyYou try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. After that's done, you pull the trigger, the gun beeps several times, then crashes.

PythonYou try to shoot yourself in the foot but you just keep hitting the whitespace between your toes.

Yeah, China's suicide rate is really high period. 13.9/100000 according to wiki. With a population of 400k, this particular company will need more than 4x more suicides this year before this becomes a real issue.

It sucks, but the people who are there are usually fleeing even worse conditions in rural china.

People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.

Yeah, China's suicide rate is really high period. 13.9/100000 according to wiki. With a population of 400k, this particular company will need more than 4x more suicides this year before this becomes a real issue.

Heck, the US has a suicide rate of 11.1/100k, I guess that's also Apple's fault.

OK, look, forgive my snark and the angry frustration that follows, but the general public is not to blame for the horrific way these factories are managed. Prices are set as high as the market will bear. Companies have entire departments whose whole job is to figure out "At what price are our profits maximized?" and costs do not enter into it. No company has ever said, "Wow, we could make a profit at $10, so even though we'd make the same number of sales at $100 for our widget, we just wouldn't feel right taking the extra money..."

The blood money these companies make does not go into my pocket. I paid plenty for my goods. At the price I paid, these workers would have full, meaningful lives if only management paid them their fair share.

Ever since Tiananmen, I have tried my best to boycott China. I routinely pay extra to buy "Made in the USA" only to find that label is a lie.

I have no way of knowing how the products I buy on a day-to-day basis were manufactured. I don't buy Nike. Guess what? Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places. Oh, "Quit buying yuppie crap," you say? All the generic goods say "Made in Godawful Horror" as well.

Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs. I understand "Our CEO Below" has quite the sweatshop prepared for him. Given the shaky state of his liver, you'd think Steve would be a bit more worried about his soul.

Yeah, that was a cheap shot. Cheap shots are all I have left. My political vote seems to count for squat. I can't even say "Vote with my wallet" with a straight face. I'd be more than happy to join the protest, but protesting from the "free speech zone" in a chainlink box in the next town doesn't get it done. I'm not willing to hurt anybody.

So if reminding the man who is responsible for this blood of his own mortality is the only shot I have left, I'll take it.

Oh, bingo. Like the furore over how the headline suicide rate in the US military is like OMFG twice the national average and more than the KIA rate!!!!11!

Then it turns out that the military is composed almost entirely of young men, and most suicides are... wait for it... young men. And when you crunch the figures, holy crap, it turns out that if you're a young man, then the safest place for you to be is in the US military.

Funny how you never see the final analysis in any headlines. I'm sure DailyKos

FoxConn has several locations, so not all 400K employees are in one place, but the biggest location is probably several times larger than anything you've ever imagined a single company could be. The name of the town escapes me for the moment.

Don't know if you all saw this or if it was on Slashdot at all, but Engadget has a full, human-done English translation [engadget.com] of the article written by a reporter who went undercover at the factory.

WARNING: engadget is extreemly pro apple and is probably being paid by apple to calm the situation. durring the iPad launch there were tons of "fluff" ipad articles hyping the thing, at one point they even had to turn comments off because people were so angry about engadget's blatent pro apple bias

Depends on what value you give yourself, and how good you can make others believe in that value. I think there should be a science of “personal marketing”. As a subsection of the "self-esteem" section of a general "self-improvement" (including self-teaching yourself new stuff) that get started in school, and continue all your life.

It’s all really just a mind game.

I rather run around the streets like in a game, making money in creative ways, doing my thing...than being practically just a re

This seems to be a case where Western mores are being applied to the Chinese. Media here in the US and the West continually attempt to reinforce their guilty feelings...

Human rights are universal. My wife's Asian. She was endowed by her Creator with the same rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that I was. My children, bearing epicanthic folds around their eyes, do not somehow possess fewer natural rights than I do.

Many of those who are working in those factories got lucky: they would be working just as hard or harder farming their own land for next to nothing.

Nope, sorry, try again. My grandparents were hillbilly subsistence farmers. Give a man a plot of land and the right to keep what he grows and he'll prosper. It's sharecroppers, constantly robbed of their harvest, who suffer. Read the histories of

Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.

Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.

Suicide rate in the USA was 12.3 out of 100,000 in 2006; total of about 33,000 suicides; that's the latest numbers. It's amazing with Apple; first we were told that an iPhone costs $2000 (because obviously we have to add all the phone contracts to the purchase price; strange that nobody did that with any other phone), then it is the amazing exploding iPods (which, strange enough, were all damaged from the outside), now it is all the suicide at Foxconn, which are obviously Apple's fault, even though Foxconn

Maybe one day the workers in China will get together and form a national union to ensure workers' rights. Maybe through their collective efforts they could make a workers' paradise. Heck, maybe they could turn the entire country into some sort of commune where everyone has to do their fair share and they all benefit from the profits.

I wonder if that could ever work. It's amazing that no people have ever tried it.

... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?

I wonder how many Happy Meal Toy factory employees off themselves in a year?

Also: according to Wikipedia, Foxconn also makes "Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment."

... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?

Actually, while the title says "iPhone Factory" none of the articles I found make that claim. They just say it is at a factory run by Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones. Most of the articles are less Apple focused and mention the other products they make too, since no one seems to know what this particular factory makes.

Restrict access to the roof? Just saying... if you can't get access to get out of the building up high, you have a hard time jumping from the window you can't get out or from the roof you can't get to.

The factory in question supposedly employs 400,000 workers. The annual suicide rate in China (as reported by the WHO) is 16.7 per 100,000 people. That means that in a population of randomly selected Chinese the size of the factory workforce, we should expect to see 400000 people * 16.7 suicides/(100000 people * 1 year) * 5 months / 12 months = 27.8 suicides so far this year.

Can we conclude that assembling shiny gadgets makes it less likely that one will commit suicide? It meets the standards for publication...

Because when you subtract the few cases that are obviously stress-induced (no company is homogeneous so i have no doubt some employees are being terrorized by their managers, but that's a criminal issue, not a corporate one), the suicide rate at this company is even lower still than the national average.

I wonder if this kind of culture is true in Taiwan too. Anyone local here to tell us a bit about it?

The weird thing is, that around here, Foxconn is only known for very el-cheapo mainboards and stuff. The kind that has a certain reputation... for half of it being defective, or things like that. I never knew that they were producing Apple hardware.Is this a plus for Foxconn, or a minus for Apple? (Considering I very often hear stories about how the interior is ac

It seems to be worse on Apple's factories. See these videos [engadget.com].

I did. I RTFA too. You might want to do that. The videos are in chinese, and the images are disturbing, but if you read the article, it's starts to make sense. And what you just said is apparently completely made up by you.
From TFA you linked to:

This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the "sweatshop" that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly. Compared to others, the facilities here are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day just to find a place of their own, to find a dream that they'll probably never realize.

This isn't a factory's inside story, but the fate of a generation of workers.

This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already, lit a fire under Foxconn's ass, because the job, besides being low pay, isn't at all bad. What I'm reading from the article is that the social culture is being blamed for these suicides, not Foxconn's treatment of their workers under Apple's direction, as much as you'd like to believe that.

The video shows a 24 year old woman committing suicide. She's so tired she can barely walk. It shows workers being denied their 10 minute breaks. It shows that 5% of the workers quit every month, and a diary where a man says he feels like he's living in workplace hell, day-after-day, year-after-year. Not that bad of a job? I certainly wouldn't do it.

Damn, I haven't even watched the videos, but... A ten minute break every hour - lost privilege (how much?), 36 hour work week, paycheck shallow enough to *beg* for overtime, if it wasn't for the 5% percent attrition rate I'd guess this was fast food. Anyways, working PC support I was considering leaving and going INTO fast food just last week, as a manager I'd make the same and nobody ever comes into McDonald's asking for a flying cheeseburger and throws a goddamn fit over it. They throw fits, but they don't ask for flying fucking cheeseburgers.

Yeah, you should try 6 days, 12 hours, labor in warehousing or 40hrs at a legitimate old hillbilly saw mill.

8 out of 400,000 =.00002%

I don't know if that's high or not and I don't mean to be insensitive, but maybe they should have quit. I dunno.

Literally that same factory makes stuff for Sony, MS, Nintendo, HP, Dell... It's not exclusively an Apple factory. It is easier to infer that though, with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.

Victorian workhouse conditions are clearly not what we want to see, but it is in no way unique to Apple.

Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all. Not even once. The Chinese reporters are talking about it, because there's a real problem at Foxcon that does not exist in their other factories.

Watch the video - workers are supposed to get a 10 minute break every hour, but the managers took away the privilege. No wonder they feel burned out

Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all.

And of course, Foxconn only makes products for Apple, and nobody but Apple, right?

The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone, with all the misery and environmental destructiveness that comes with it. Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.

The sad fact is that life is naturally miserable. Solving that problem is not easy, and the answer isn't to dumbly blame capitalism when the problem is really so much bigger.

They are only able to operate in such a way because they have the necessary trappings of government - things like defense - taken care of for them.

It only really works if you can do it in isolation, which is why communes tend to be out in the middle of nowhere. It also only works in small enough numbers that pure democracy works, and even then they invariably have natural leaders - like the pastor and deacons of the Amish church.

Look at the U.S. It's a combination of capitalism and communism. Our government collects portions of our income and disperses it into public projects: infrastructure, aid, health care...even the occasional direct payment which, as far as I can tell, is a completely political piece of nonsense used to pander to the masses. It works fairly well, but it should apply a little more taxation on the truly rich. Not giving money to the poor directly, but not forcing the poor to pay the rich person's prices.

The government in the U.S. would do well by subsidizing more things: farming is well subsidized; education needs a whole hell of a lot more money; alternative fuel research and implementation would help drive down gas prices as well as provide more economic means of transportation. I don't want to take your iPhone, nor do I want straight-up handouts. But why not tweak the market a bit more to bring down internet prices, deploy a better network infrastructure, etc.

Communism has no government. The workers make decisions democratically about what items to make in their factory, and then make those items.

Of course such a system would never work outside of Marx's book. In the real world either there would be undirected chaos, or there would be a dictator (or oligarchs) who would take advantage of the situation and become the central leader --- which is what happened to the Soviet Union. In theory the "soviets" (groups of workers) were supposed to have a voice in their local factories and communities, similar to a democracy, but in reality it became a top-down system where the workers voices were ignored.

How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?

Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms. Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism

Holy false dichotomy, Batman! The choice is not, nor has it ever been, between pure unregulated capitalism and Soviet-style communism. What China has now is basically a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism.

The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then, we've struggled to find the right level of regulation that will encourage stability and maintain a robust middle class while enabling growth. Different people have different theories on how much and what type regulation is the most effective, but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.

There is a much greater correlation between poor governance and economic ruin than there is between any single economic policy and economic ruin.

If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle. The problem we're having right now is that people are so shy of communism that they've relabeled ANYTHING other than unrestricted capitalism as extreme, and we're tilting heavily in the other way. It is unsustainable, and if people don't figure out the real issue soon enough (that the wealthiest people in our society are often the least productive, and that the occupations currently given the highest rewards are ones which explicitly do not create anything of actual value, just bigger numbers after the dollar sign) what has happened so far will look like a drop in the bucket. Real financial reform would bring back into balance the financial reward of shuffling numbers on paper with the value of producing actual things of real value... I am unaware of any current effort in any body of any government to do so, so at least for now I'd say to expect more of the same.

Subsistence farming is not really sustainable. At the scale required to sustain the earth's current population, it WOULD be more environmentally destructive. We could kill a lot of people, but that is a different problem.

This is unregulated capitalism in action. China is like the US or Britain during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Demand for manufactured product from China has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, and the Chinese have a seemingly unending supply of unskilled labor to do the work. Companies can work employees to death with no particular worries, since there are lots of people to replace those workers with and the government doesn't seem to care. Many of the worst abuses of 19th century Western labor are present today in China.

Hopefully someday the Chinese government will enact (and enforce!) the kind of health and safety regulations that put an end to this sort of thing in the Western world (for the most part), but it will take sustained pressure both from inside and outside the country to get it done. Unfortunately, the Chinese government ruthlessly puts down dissent internally, and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it. Consumer pressure could play a big role in forcing change, but most people seem too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care about the people who make it.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but until the Chinese government can be persuaded to regulate its industries we'll continue to see stories of this nature (the ones that aren't suppressed, anyway).

The situation in China is hardly "unregulated". The problem is that the attitude in China is a bit more nationalistic. They view human casualties as an appropriate cost for ensuring the strength of the nation as a whole. Market competitiveness is very important to them as their world standing (particularly in manufacturing) is a point of pride for them.

Is that's true, then why did the Chinese government start an investigation after suicide 6? Why is the news reporter saying Foxcon has management problems, and that it's destroying lives of their young people, and should be sharing some of it ~500 million earning with the workers? Sounds like concern to me --- not the cold-hearted "oh well, that's life" you described.

If you think like that, and you truly believe that everyone is a brainless moron that just does what corporations want, then how & why would YOU be different ?

Quite frankly, if you are indeed correct, and apple users have no culpability, no control over apple, then you need to be locked up. Simply because of what you imply you'd do if you ever heard the "kill the poor" single.

Besides, if what you say were true, why would apple bother to actually build working devices ? If marketing has 1% the power you

The Foxconn plant issues are typical of plants in China, where the employees make dollars a day and work 80 hour weeks and the owner makes millions and drives a Mercedes-Benz.

This is not capitalism in action. This is greed in action.

A local Honda supplier plant here in Central Indiana that makes engines for North American Honda Civics and where the president of said plant makes less than 5x the amount of the workers is capitalism in action. Indiana automotive workers are part of capitalism in action and are not treated in the same manner as Chinese workers. Honda engines could be made in China for significantly less, but they aren't, and that is also capitalism in action.

My point is that capitalistic factories, like those in the US, don't have nearly these kinds of suicide rates.

You might want to look into US history to see how the factories used to be. They were, and are, capitalistic, the conditions however have changed, mainly due to worker organization and government regulations.

Read about the Stalin years to learn more about communistic factories and farms.

I'm well aware of Stalin's atrocities and the problems with the Soviet Union. The factories and farms were owned

Bully for you. I, on the other hand, will purchase my next phone hungrily

|SPARKLE| |SPARKLE|*

* Vampires sparkle now, right? Or do they still brood palely in the corner while the Cocteau Twins' tender but dark lyrics float over the crowd? I can't keep my pop culture undead types straight anymore, what with all these kids and their newfangled** ways of representing the dark lords of the night.

I am no Apple fan boy but you are not being fair.This is Foxconn and not Apple. If Apple offered to pay more for the product what makes you think that Foxconn would pass that on to the workers or improve the workers conditions?Also from the wikipedia."Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone for Apple Inc.;Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.;
various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard;motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm;the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft,cell phones for Motorola,the Amazon Kindle,and Cisco equipment"Apple is no more to blame than Nintendo, Sony, HP, Dell, Motorola, Amazon, and Cisco.

Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really! At one time Apple made computers in the US as did other companies.Or at least make them in countries that care a little about their employees?

If you are going to fire off blame put it first on China. China needs to put in labor laws to protect it's own people. Second lay the blame on Foxconn for exploiting those people. Then put the blame on all the companies listed.Finally lets all take a little blame for not caring where we get our toys from.I am glad to say that when I went shopping for a lawn mower I worked hard to find one that was not made in China. It was made in Canada.

How many Americans do you know who would really be willing to work on an assembly line? I did it once for a summer job, and it wasn't fun. Already we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork, and yardwork is way better than assembly-line stuff. It would take a serious economic downturn before people would want to go back to factories.

Thousands of people in this country would jump at a chance to do assembly line work.

As for the line that "we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork", thats just the line pro-immigrant-explotation people spew. Yards were cleaned and grass was clipped before everything went to illegal and migrant labor in the 1990s. I should know, I worked yard crew in college, about the time the immigration laws stopped being enforced the illegals who would work hard and cheaper put us all out of business.

I talk to 'ordinary people' all the time. What opinion do you want them to have? That Obama is not an American? I can find some 'ordinary people' who feel that way. Sure, there are some people who want to work on an assembly line, just like there are some people who run off into the woods for years to get away from it all. Doesn't mean it's representative of the population.

Michael Moore has an agenda, so he will show you what he wants you to see. If you want a clearer picture, you have to go elsewhere

Oh jeez, Canada? That's even worse. Those poor Canucks spend their days working in -40 CELSIUS, that's like I dunno -9000 Fahrenheit, for like 12 hours a day. Oh and their days are really dark since they are so far north. Their factories are just really big igloos and most Canadians have to forage for their own food. For instance, I had to go club a few seals the other day just to feed my family, and then PETA threw blood all over my igloo. Don't get me started on the epic trek it is just to GET to work, most men my age have to wear their fathers pajamas and make it to work through blizzard or polar bear.

Steve jobs once developed a factory that was almost entirely automated, requiring a very minimum number of employees to build 20,000 computers a month. they spent alot of time and energy developing and refining the process, and it was an achievement that he was really proud of..

I have never seen so much liberal-bullshit crammed into a single sentence as that last one. Congrats, you must be proud.

Yes, if you die because of good old-fashioned US-American values like capitalism, you deserve to; and you should be proud to die for such a heroic principle. Every death that makes somebody a few bucks is a good death.